Donald Trump and the Plague of Atomization in a Neoliberal Age

We live in an age of death-dealing loneliness, isolation and militarized atomization. If you believe the popular press, loneliness is reaching epidemic proportions in advanced industrial societies. A few indices include the climbing suicide rate of adolescent girls; the rising deaths of working-class, less-educated white men; and the growing drug overdose crises raging across small towns and cities throughout America. Meanwhile, many people often interact more with their cell phones, tablets and computers than they do with embodied subjects. Disembodiment in this view is at the heart of a deeply alienating neoliberal society in which people shun in-person relationships for virtual ones. In this view, the warm glow of the computer screen can produce and reinforce a new type of alienation, isolation and sense of loneliness. At the same time, it is important to note that in some cases digital technologies have also enabled young people who are hyper-connected to their peers online to increase their face-to-face time by coordinating spontaneous meetups, in addition to staying connected with each other near-constantly virtually. How this dialectic plays out will in part be determined by the degree to which young people can be educated to embrace modes of agency in which a connection to other human beings, however diverse, becomes central to their understanding of the value of creating bonds of sociality.

Needless to say, however, blaming the internet itself — which has also helped forge connections, and has facilitated movement-building and much wider accessibility of information — is too easy. We live in a society in which notions of dependence, compassion, mutuality, care for the other and sociality are undermined by a neoliberal ethic in which self-interest and greed become the organizing principles of one’s life and a survival-of-the fittest ethic breeds a culture that at best promotes an indifference to the plight of others and at worst, a disdain for the less fortunate and support for a widespread culture of cruelty. Isolated individuals do not make up a healthy democratic society.

New Forms of Alienation and Isolation

A more theoretical language produced by Marx talked about alienation as a separation from the fruits of one’s labor. While that is certainly truer than ever, the separation and isolation now is more extensive and governs the entirety of social life in a consumer-based society run by the demands of commerce and the financialization of everything. Isolation, privatization and the cold logic of instrumental rationality have created a new kind of social formation and social order in which it becomes difficult to form communal bonds, deep connections, a sense of intimacy, and long term commitments.

Neoliberalism fosters the viewing of pain and suffering as entertainment, warfare a permanent state of existence, and militarism as the most powerful force shaping masculinity. Politics has taken an exit from ethics and thus the issue of social costs is divorced from any form of intervention in the world. For example, under neoliberalism, economic activity is removed from its ethical and social consequences and takes a flight from any type of moral consideration. This is the ideological metrics of political zombies. The key word here is atomization, and it is the defining feature of neoliberal societies and the scourge of democracy.

At the heart of any type of politics wishing to challenge this flight into authoritarianism is not merely the recognition of economic structures of domination, but something more profound — a politics which points to the construction of particular identities, values, social relations, or more broadly, agency itself. Central to such a recognition is the fact that politics cannot exist without people investing something of themselves in the discourses, images and representations that come at them daily. Rather than suffering alone, lured into the frenzy of hateful emotion, individuals need to be able to identify — see themselves and their daily lives — within progressive critiques of existing forms of domination and how they might address such issues not individually but collectively. This is a particularly difficult challenge today because the menace of atomization is reinforced daily not only by a coordinated neoliberal assault against any viable notion of the social but also by an authoritarian and finance-based culture that couples a rigid notion of privatization with a flight from any sense of social and moral responsibility.

The culture apparatuses controlled by the 1 percent, including the mainstream media and entertainment industries, are the most powerful educational forces in society and they have become disimagination machines — apparatuses of misrecognition and brutality. Collective agency is now atomized, devoid of any viable embrace of the social. Under such circumstances, domination does not merely repress through its apparatuses of terror and violence, but also — as Pierre Bourdieu argues — through the intellectual and pedagogical, which “lie on the side of belief and persuasion.” Too many people on the left have defaulted on this enormous responsibility for recognizing the educative nature of politics and the need for appropriating the tools, if not weapons, provided by the symbolic and pedagogical for challenging this form of domination, working to change consciousness, and making education central to politics itself.

Donald Trump’s Media Strategy

Donald Trump plays the media because he gets all of this. His media strategy is aimed at erasing memory, thoughtfulness and critical dialogue. For Trump, miseducation is the key to getting elected. The issue here is not about the existing reign of civic illiteracy, it is about the crisis of agency, the forces that produce it, and the failure of progressives and the left to take such a crisis seriously by working hard to address the ideological and pedagogical dimensions of struggle. All of which is necessary in order, at the very least, to get people to be able to translate private troubles into wider social issues. The latter may be the biggest political and educational challenge facing those who believe that the current political crisis is not simply about either the election of Trump, the ruling-class carnival barker, or Clinton, the warmonger, both of whom are in the end different types of cheerleaders for the financial elite and big corporations.